Notices by Chip (bytex64@awesome.garden)

@botvolution That’s unfortunate. The magic word here is “debootstrap”, but you’ll only know to search for that if you’re already quite familiar with the process.

(And in case you were still looking, this appears to be just about as manual as I could imagine. https://gist.github.com/subrezon/9c04d10635ebbfb737816c5196c8ca24)

The proto board will be lights and switches, and it connects via headers to a SparkFun ESP32 Thing. It turns out there’s just enough space between for a vape battery. I’ll design a case for it, but that’s a ways off yet.

I realized during planning that the 10 position bar graph display has the same 0.1 inch pitch as dupont headers, so that will be an indicator for signals on that port. You could show levels, activity, protocol detection, etc. I’m pretty pleased with that.

The fun part is this is a junk build. It’s all stuff I had lying around (… okay the LED modules I bought very recently more or less for this project but they’re lying around *now*).

So I’m making a… thing. A pocket tool sort of in the vein of a cyberdeck, but for low-medium speed digital signals analysis. Something you can use to poke at a circuit board in the field to figure out where the UART console is or the frequency of a clock or logging an I2C bus.

I uh, ran out of pins because I did not exactly plan this out before I started. “ESP32 has a lot of pins, yeah? It’ll be fine.” I had exactly enough to have 10 pins on the external connector and run the 4x8 LED matrix and zero left over for buttons. And the annoying thing I keep forgetting about the ESP32 Regular is six pins (34-39) are input only with no pull-ups or pull-downs and the last four support the ADC preamp.

But after thinking about it I realized that a LED matrix column driver and a keyboard matrix column driver are basically the same thing. So the column drivers can do both simultaneously. And those input-only pins will work fine to read the keyboard matrix with external pull-downs.

Ah fuck I need one for the laser. Okay I guess I can dual-purpose one of the external I/Os.

(Yeah, of course it has a laser. For laser reasons.)

I actually really do not enjoy this kind of hand wiring. Even though I was organized and careful, inevitably some of this will be cross-wired or broken. I would really rather spend a few days designing a PCB, then spend $30 and wait two weeks for it. But I decided this was a “junk only” build.

Boy I hope some of this is right.

It’s a 4x8 LED matrix. The two digits are hooked up as you’d expect. The ten segment is eight on one column, and two go with the +/-1 module, which happens to have six (if you’re counting along at home, the top and bottom of the + are separate segments).

@botvolution Even if it is a knockoff, I’m sure it’ll be perfectly serviceable. I’ve got a cheap one and it works great.

@liebach Apologies for the Amazon link, but I got some Toocki silicone cables and they are super flexible. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F1TLWV8X

@botvolution Describes basically the whole tech industry now. 😅

Thinking on it a bit more, I wouldn’t be surprised if this originally comes from some AI vendor who smelled a good grift. Grease the right palms, fake a demo with a brown person being a secret ANTIFA TERRORIST hidden deep in their Instagram feed. Bing bang boom.

@botvolution I think it’s likely they don’t understand the practicalities either. What I imagine will happen is 1) all of it is archived somewhere for future digging by national security services, and 2) they’ll throw it at an LLM with the hopes it will flag anything suspicious. I don’t think the second one is impractical, but obviously has some limitations that I bet they don’t understand.

@botvolution Is the brightness important? I’d just put a 680 in. Honestly a 1K would probably work.

@botvolution @MLE_online It’s maybe a bit weird to call it “parasitic” but literally everything that moves electrical current creates an electromagnetic field around it. A significant amount of product design work is preventing it from escaping the device, actually! So it makes sense to me that the coils in a speaker would work as a low power low frequency radio transmitter.

By transducer do you mean a piezo speaker? (“transducer” is a general term - any coil speaker is also a kind of transducer). I think the tiny speakers in phones are still coil speakers because a piezo has very uneven frequency response.

Hey, remember this thing? The USB hub I designed and had boards made for back in *checks notes* March!? Finally got around to building it now that things have calmed down. Let's see how badly this goes.

Here is the schematic for the Microsoft two-button PS/2 mouse version 2.1A.

I picked up a prerelease copy of “Designing Electronics That Work” by Hunter Scott. And I think I can recommend it on the force of this paragraph alone. #Electronics

I have a crazy idea that I can 3D print a D-sub connector. Specifically, the unobtainable 23-pin variety found on the Amiga. So I bought someone else’s DigiKey leftovers to give it a shot.

Surprisingly and helpfully, the printed engineering drawing was included. (Unhelpfully, it is in inches)

These are crimp contacts even though for the Spite Sprite they’ll be soldered directly to the board. TE actually does make push-in solder cup contacts, but they’re very hard to find these days.

@botvolution Accurate, except we’d definitely call it the “SlapForce Ultimate Mill ‘er and Drill ‘er 9000”.

@botvolution I’m sure you’ve found it by now but the official name is “trackpoint”.

@botvolution Generally:

for X in *.flac; do Y="$(basename '$X' .flac).mp3"; frob $X $Y; done

If you need to do this on a whole tree, replace *.flac with $(find . -name '*.flac'). If you need to do it on a really big tree, look into find | xargs.

And FWIW, I wrote a tool to help automate this kind of conversion because make doesn’t handle spaces well. https://git.bytex64.net/conv/

(Forgive any errors, I typed this one handed on my phone. 😅)